Improve endurance for ice hockey -
And yes, this even includes the best hockey athletes on the planet today. The undeniable truth is that many hockey athletes today are successful despite their training, and not because of it.
There are many hockey athletes who could have made the team who never did and many games that could have been won but never were. Perhaps most unfortunate, a vast amount of untapped performance that never lived up to their true potential. When you have discussion forums, blogs, and DVDs dedicated to showing hockey players that they need to squat in skates, tie their hockey stick to a cable tower, and perform all exercises on a wobble board — then you have an industry that needs a complete rehaul and to finally get rid of the unnecessary application of the same uninspiring and unintelligent approach to hockey training.
It is my goal with this project to provide the gold-standard resource for both hockey players and hockey coaches to learn the truth behind the science of hockey conditioning and how to separate all of the fact from fiction.
This article represents the next stage in evolution for hockey conditioning and will be the most comprehensive guide on hockey conditioning available in the market today. It is my 1 goal to provide clarity within this article and to change the trajectory of this industry moving forward, this begins with you.
By the time you are done reading this entire article, you will come to the realization that conditioning is a precise and delicate science that requires careful monitoring and thoughtful, strategic program design.
With this knowledge, you will turn your weaknesses into strengths and finally reach your true potential in this sport. You will also hear statements get thrown around at your local gyms such as:.
A powerlifter who is able to generate a tremendous amount of force and power within a 6-second timeframe over the course of an entire minute workout is equally as conditioned as a marathon runner who just ran a marathon.
Each sport requires a different combination of power ability to produce force quickly , strength force production capacity , and endurance ability to produce energy for an extended period of time.
Some sports will require more power than others with little need for endurance, while others may represent the exact opposite. Most team sports though, like hockey, will fall somewhere in the middle of this. In order to maximize your sport performance, you must analyze the demands of the sport and adjust your programming accordingly.
Super important note here, in the next sections I am not teaching you the underlying physiology of energy system production just for fun.
I am teaching you each of the energy systems and what their exact demand is so that you can design your programming to create true hockey specific conditioning. Without a fundamental understanding of the energy systems, you might as well be designing conditioning programs with a blindfold on and one hand tied behind your back.
When you have a firm grip on the underlying physiology, the result is that you are able to design your own programs that allow you to create the sport-specific energy you need to perform your best come game day.
If your muscles can generate Adenosine Tri-Phosphate ATP, the fuel that our muscles run on fast enough and for long enough, then you will have good conditioning for your sport. If not, well then you did a bunch of exercising, and not training.
Exercising is simply being physically active and burning calories. This is A-OK for the general population who are just looking to lose some weight and improve their body composition. Training, on the other hand, is utilizing the training principles that are deeply woven into the science of program design and combining that principal knowledge with your understanding of muscle physiology to create an exact result at an exact time over a periodized schedule.
But, a marathon runner is no more conditioned to do a powerlifting workout than a powerlifter is to run a marathon. Apples and oranges. Conditioning is completely dependant on your sport-specific demands—not just how aerobically fit you are as most people seem to define it. When it comes to hockey athletes, they are alactic-aerobic athletes.
Meaning, the game is predominantly composed of short, high-intensity bouts of effort followed up by longer duration, lower intensity bouts of effort.
Is running good for hockey? Yes, running especially sprinting is great for hockey conditioning. Sprinting is great for alactic-aerobic training, and slower tempo runs are great for aerobic training.
Your friend is missing out on what his potential could have otherwise been if he incorporated intelligent hockey training into his regime.
I want to quickly discuss energy system integration while summarizing the energy systems for you as well to give you an easy overview. The ATP molecule consists of adenosine a molecule of adenine joined to a molecule of ribose combined with three inorganic phosphate groups. When ATP is combined with water and acted on by the enzyme ATPase, the last phosphate group splits away, rapidly releasing large amounts of energy ~7.
For example, in a second m sprint, the alactic system will dominate, but both the anaerobic alactic and even aerobic systems will provide a small amount of the energy needed. On the other end, if you performed a 10,m minute run—your aerobic system will dominate but your alactic and lactic systems will contribute some energy as well.
There is a reciprocal relationship between the three energy systems with respect to overall power and capacity. In contrast, the aerobic system takes much longer to produce ATP, but the energy it can generate is essentially unlimited — which plays major dividends towards hockey games since they last up to two hours in some cases.
Do I really need to know this stuff? It seems really scientific. The reality is that the specific conditioning of these energy systems provides the specific fuel that you need in order to get your muscles to do the job you want them to do.
They require energy at a constant rate to do their job of contracting and relaxing your muscles in a coordinated manner to move you around.
Your cardiac muscles require energy to pump blood throughout your body and recycle it back eventually, so the more active you are, the more active your heart has to be as well. The fuel for all of these actions is ATP, it is the energy currency for life as we know it.
Without ATP, there is no life. That whole process of creating an optimal meal plan for the best performance and recovery is largely about providing the exact biological energy our muscles need in order to perform the activities that the predominant energy system is going to need fuel for.
Breaking down energy production further, we are primarily looking at three different components of physical preparedness to know if our hockey athletes are at optimal conditioning levels and are ready to tryouts, camps, or the competitive season.
Additionally, we can use these as markers to see if our programming needs any tweaking to get a more customized result for a hockey athlete who may have a unique weak link in the chain, these three important pieces are:.
Power represents your rate of force development, whereas strength would represent your absolute strength. For example, if you take two athletes who can both deadlift lbs, but, one athlete can deadlift the lbs faster than the other athlete—their strength is the same, but the one who did it faster is more powerful.
Because he was able to generate the amount of force required to deadlift the lbs faster than the other athlete, thus, making him more powerful.
Or, your ability to take a full slapshot faster than your opponent. In order to generate a crazy power level, your muscles need to be able to contract and relax with lightning speed.
This is important to point out because the faster your alactic system can generate this energy, the more power you will be able to generate. Or 15secs? Or mins? The duration of your energy production is fundamentally important to your understanding as someone who is interested in improving their hockey performance.
This duration refers to and sheds important insight on both your current capability and how much improvement you have left in the tank. There are some major things that you need to take home and understand when it comes to the capacity of energy production.
Plain and simple. But, for completeness, I need to give a tip of the hat and acknowledge that skill and technique play an immeasurable role in energy economy. Your body works very hard to generate energy when you need it, but how effectively and economically it can create this energy to utilize this energy effectively depends largely on your technique.
My arms and legs are going crazy in water, and I have no efficiency whatsoever, whereas for others it looks like a totally effortless process. Part of improving your hockey conditioning comes exclusively down technical ability, hockey players need to learn how to use the energy they produce as efficiently as possible through proper technique.
Yes, nutrition is a critical factor in providing your cells with the energy they need to go all three periods. We place so much importance on this that I wrote an entire hockey nutrition guide for you here. I am going to go ahead and skip all of the deeper physiology behind how each energy system creates its energy and all of the biological stimuli and adaptations that occur very simply because I wrote an incredibly extensive hockey-specific manual on this within the Next Level Conditioning 2.
This is only one of the several reasons why I am totally opposed to the idea that hockey athletes only need to perform one method of conditioning to identify themselves as optimally conditioned for hockey performance.
It is completely foolish thinking to do so. Practically speaking, hockey athletes should be using a variety of training zones varying levels of conditioning intensity throughout their programming to achieve different sets of adaptations as required by the specifics of their sport and their individual needs to fix their weak points.
Conceptually, this is no different at all than strength athletes using a variety of training zones for muscle hypertrophy, strength, power, or endurance. It seems pretty straightforward. Again, yet another reason why no single intensity could ever possibly be considered optimal.
Like everything in strength and conditioning, it turned out to be a lot more complicated as the research continued on. Both lactate and lactic acid appear to be more beneficial than anything else. This means that your aerobic capacity actually improves your anaerobic performance.
Another strike against the coaches who only use one training modality. Is it true that you can become dominant in one energy system so much so that it hurts the others? Yes, this is absolutely true and is incredibly common for hockey athletes who overemphasize jogging and end up becoming aerobically dominant.
Like I said previously, I want to focus a little more on the adaptation side of the equation in this comprehensive article as the inner workings of each individual system can be found in extreme detail within the Next Level Conditioning 2.
In order to have this discussion appropriately, we need to dive down to the molecular level and identify where the stimulus for these adaptations are really coming from.
When you take a look at the metabolic pathways; calcium levels in the muscle, fuel utilization fatty acids and glycogen , and free radical production are all turning out to play key roles in the stimulus that occurs from endurance training which if you are properly recovered, that stimulus will turn into the adaptation of improved endurance.
Reactive oxygen species is particularly interesting because we have a growing body of data now that has linked high-doses of antioxidants to actually reduce the number of benefits you are gaining from exercise.
Simply put, if you lessen the stimulus via antioxidants blunting reactive oxygen species production , you also lessen the adaptation. However, the most important component of what determines the end-point adaptation is something called adenosine monophosphate kinase AMPk. Now, I have discussed AMPk before when it comes to scheduling your training properly , so if you have been a follower of my work you should be up to speed.
Essentially, AMPk senses energy within your muscle cells and it reacts in response to the energy state of the muscle cell — this response can have a number of effects on your physiology.
For example, when AMPk is activated, your muscle will:. This explains a lot when it comes to poor programming design by some hockey coaches because mTOR is the primary driver for anabolism within the muscle cell to support growth and strength development. But, what is relevant to this project is the known fact that AMPk stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis which is the creation of new mitochondria so that you can burn more energy for longer.
This is simply the over-expression of AMPk stimulation through a well-designed program to create more and more endurance in the skeletal muscle tissue. And as I alluded to previously, mitochondria are also involved in buffering and filtering out fatigue producing by-products out of the muscle cell.
For example, in the initial phases of the offseason, I will begin with a much higher load of aerobic work usually tempo runs and circuits to allow my athletes to gain an aerobic base, but, as the offseason starts to come to a close and get closer to the competitive season — I will slowly taper out the aerobic work and replace it with anaerobic work to drive the degree of training specificity up but also allow them to get better gains from their anaerobic work due to their strong foundation in aerobic conditioning.
Under normal conditions, the body is using ATP for fuel and can make as much as it will ever need. What happens here is that your cell senses that its energy levels have been disrupted so it turns on a bunch of other mechanisms to try and combat that.
When AMPk is activated through well-designed hockey conditioning programs, you get a hockey-specific adaptation. Mitochondria grow in number and density, your aerobic energy enzymes increase, and a bunch of other things all fall into place which ultimately gives you improved endurance out on the ice.
Making things simpler, if you look at it from a common-sense point of view it makes a whole lot of sense why this occurs. Increasing your conditioning simply means that your body is better able to produce energy and continue to do so without running into fatigue issues.
The power output or endurance duration that had previously created an imbalanced ratio between ATP and ADP no longer does due to your improved adaptations mitochondria, enzymes, blood flow, etc. This also clearly explains why you have to continue to overload your conditioning training in some way or another.
Some research has demonstrated that AMPk is only activated if a certain level of endurance-based intensity has been surpassed, however, even at low intensities, long enough durations of training can still stimulate AMPk and adaptations to training.
A well-designed hockey conditioning program must optimize all of the stimuli at the right level and in the correct dosage in order to generate a hockey specific conditioning result. Beyond this, the programs also need to be progressed intelligently over time using either intensity, duration, or density — any of these would be great options and it would totally depend upon the program design to determine which one would be best at a certain time.
That went a little over my head, what are the cliff notes here? Work capacity is a term that is thrown around very often in the strength and conditioning world, but yet it is very often poorly defined. For the purposes of this article, I want to simplify things and separate work capacity into two main categories:.
The modality of the work itself is irrelevant. What is important here is general recovery — durability, energy substrate stores, cardiac output, and other general components of overall endurance that essentially provide the foundation for an athlete to train and compete for longer while recovering better.
Put another way, this is why you can play hockey for so long, but then begin to tire very quickly when playing sports such as basketball or tennis. Improving your general work capacity is one of the many benefits you gain from taking a more well-rounded approach to your conditioning programming.
More aerobic work leads to improved fat utilization during exercise, spares glucose for recovery, ensures a high percentage of glycogen is metabolized aerobically vs.
anaerobically creating less fatigue , and generally helps the athlete maintain alertness. The problem is most athletes mistake GPP work as something that should only be left for the in-season and is a modality that involves high-intensity circuit training such as tire flips, weighted carries, choppers, and other forms of interval work that are very intense.
GPP at its fundamental definition is something that should represent an activity that is intentionally different as possible from hockey.
This creates the best of both worlds and creates real hockey performance gains. This is one of the least productive things you could do in the in-season, especially since very few understand how to combat the accompanying structural balance issues that come along for the ride with overuse of the SPP work.
Specific work capacity is defined on the tissue level or movement level; it is the ability of the hockey athlete to perform a sport-specific or task-specific movement over and over again with minimal performance decrease.
For example, for an Olympic lifter specific work capacity may in part be defined as the number of high quality clean and jerks that can be performed in a given period of time. For a hockey player, this could be slapshots or skating sprints.
These numbers could be improved almost exclusively by doing more clean and jerks for the Olympic lifter or more slapshots and skating sprints for the hockey player.
This type of specific work for these athletes would improve their movement efficiency, optimize their muscle fiber recruitment, refine their technique, improve local capillary networks, and improve local mitochondrial density. These are the adaptations that require the individual to perform the sport movement over and over again.
If you wanted to improve your deadlift, nothing is going to be more specific than doing more deadlifts. But, as you move down the food chain, Romanian deadlifts are going to pop up, tire flips will be further down the line than that, kettle swings further down the line than that, and hill sprints somewhere near the bottom.
When constructing offseason and in-season training programs, consider always incorporating accessory movement to build upon the overall potential of your specific fitness, but it is always important to keep some combination of both in play.
A final point I want to leave this section with is the immense importance behind building functional muscle tissue if your goals are to enhance lean mass while still becoming a better hockey player.
Meaning, I have found working with hundreds of hockey athletes that if you gain a bunch of lean mass without simultaneously utilizing conditioning methods in their programming then you can decrease their general work capacity significantly.
This is represented by the true absolute peak of oxygen uptake, and therefore, aerobic performance. Conversely, powerlifters legs are generally far less adapted in this area.
Their oxygen utilization is significantly less, to the point of no comparison. It would only take one assessment doing a VO2 max test between an endurance athlete and a powerlifter on a bike or treadmill to see the immediate differences.
It has less capillary density, has a low level of mitochondrial density, and a low level of enzyme production. The hockey athlete who dedicates an offseason exclusively to mass at the expense of other work will notice a decrease in GPP VO2 max, as body weight is increasing but oxygen utilized per unit of muscle mass is not , but also SPP as your local vascular networks or movement mechanics with this new muscle mass are not up to par.
It is therefore critical to the hockey athlete that they maintain some form of conditioning work into their programming during any strength or muscle hypertrophy phase. I heard slide boards are the best training tool for hockey specific conditioning and power, do you agree?
However, slideboards can be beneficial if you use them correctly, check out this guide here for more information. Hockey mobility is something that has come up time and time again in my videos, blogs, and podcasts. In fact, I even created an entire manual on hockey-specific mobility here that you can get for free.
As a relatable example, just think about your class you grew up with when you were just a wee one. The most unathletic guys were also the guys whose movement mechanics looked ridiculous.
Sure, you can be strong while being tight, and a decent athlete perhaps. The best athletes in the world are never walking around with the movement mechanics of the tinman. Here are the two biggest reasons why I always hammer home the concept of the importance behind tightness:.
Without giving any of their players any real advice or program structure to go from. Attitude shifts need to happen here for sure, and the reason why athletes normally have a poor attitude towards stretching is that I think they:.
Targeting and improving tightness is a way to improve performance without even changing anything else. You could be training the same, eating the same, and executing everything else from whatever your routine is. Luckily for us, mobility work with hockey players is highly universal.
The movement mechanics of the game are quite similar regardless of the position except for goalies which creates the same type of issues.
If you remember from above, energy efficiency is one of the most important aspects you could ever improve when it comes to your conditioning levels. If you look at a hockey player, he is bent over at the waist for pretty much the entire game.
During a face-off, when taking a shot, when skating, and even sitting on the bench. This shortens and tightens the hip flexors which can lead to a whole host of postural issues including pain in the hips during movement or weight training, tightness in the hips, rounded shoulders, shoulder impingements, low back lordosis and a forward lean in the neck.
Anybody who knows posture knows a healthy posture increases both your power output and reduces your susceptibility to injury. These are issues that have to be addressed as soon as the offseason training begins because during the season it is tough to get the necessary work done.
Remember, proper resistance training can and should be increasing your flexibility as well. The whole idea that lifting weights is going to tighten you up overtime is only true if you train that way. If you properly train like an athlete, it is going to actually play in your favor for mobility, among many other things.
In addition to the above, chronic bending over at the waist causes the pelvis to rotate forward, creating that low back lordosis this will show itself a lot if you perform a barbell overhead squat but can also affect the core muscles ability to fire properly.
All power originates from the ground up and if your core is not up to par your ability to produce power takes a negative hit. This negative hit can come in the form of poor posture and tight hips.
The very common tightness in hockey players within the Achilles tendon and the calves has mostly to do with skating mechanics vs running mechanics over the course of a competitive season. When running you have a much greater ability to fully extend the foot pointing the toe downwards in a straight on movement.
Whereas in hockey on the ice the foot is sideways when taking strides and there is much less overall extension at the ankle, but still a ton of tension is being created through muscle contraction which can create tightness over time. Just like always being bent over at the hips, the foot is always in that right-angle position as well.
This is flexion on top of flexion. Running has a direct crossover to speed on the ice when performed properly and also helps to both alleviate tightness and drive structural balance in the quadriceps.
Structured running systems to achieve both your speed development and conditioning for the upcoming season is ideal during the summer for hockey players, more on these program design aspects later when we start talking about sprinting, plyometrics, and putting all of this stuff together.
With the Achilles tendon and calve tightness, it is an issue that seems to correct itself a little faster than the hips and is also much easier for the athletes to see and understand in their minds. Once this tightness is alleviated both your skating and running mechanics will improve which will improve conditioning primarily and so will your stride length which will have a greater impact on your speed development.
Once these are improved you have a greater potential in trainability in these areas which is going to have direct impacts on your speed and agility. The biceps femoris muscle of the hamstring in combination with the vastus lateralis muscle in the quadriceps both get tightened for the same reasons, they are prime movers in the force generated during skating.
Hockey players are always overusing one aspect of their body and always under using another aspect. This leads to the structural imbalances and tightness that are so common in any unilateral sport.
Overusing all of these muscles we are discussing during practice and games during the season and then going right into the offseason to overuse and tighten them up some more is not only a recipe for injury but also a recipe for lackluster results. If you strengthen a muscle, it will be able to express that strength in all planes of motion.
Especially in hockey. The vastus lateralis is that big muscle on the outside of your quad, its job to apply force down on the ice to propel you forward. Both of these muscles get overused during hockey which leads to them both becoming tight as a rock.
Just take a look at your legs. Most hockey players when it comes time for the offseason have biceps femoris and vastus lateralis muscles that resemble steel rods.
Way too tight in order to function properly and is something that we have to address immediately in order to improve speed and conditioning over the offseason. An important thing to note is that the vastus lateralis connects to the knee and when it tightens up bad it is also more susceptible to bring the knee out of place.
Think about it like this, the vastus lateralis is so tight it is pulling the knee out diagonally towards it. This can cause not just acute injury, but long-term career ending injury.
This is a good indication you are either far too tight or have overdone chest work in relation to upper back work. To be quite honest, younger guys are the worst offenders for this. But in reality, back exercises should outweigh chest exercises with a ratio until this is corrected.
Meaning, if you have bench press in a workout, then you should be balancing this out with both chin-ups and face pulls in order to maintain postural integrity 2 back exercises to 1.
Doing this will not only improve their structural balance, injury prevention, and posture, but will also help with that bench press power that they are after. Your back is the foundation at which you press from, the wider your back, the wider your foundation.
Also, in a relaxed position they should be symmetrical in height. One should not be higher or lower than the other. This type of tightness usually results in a forward head lean as well. Addressing shoulder tightness with hockey players is extremely important for puck handling ability, shot power and shot accuracy.
The internal and external rotator muscles work together to create a lot of this motion and hockey players normally have a bigger issue with their external rotators and specifically their scapula retractors.
Hockey is a fast-paced sport, and if you're a player, you need to be on your toes to keep up. Just like with any other sport, it's important to train properly beforehand so you're at peak performance during games.
Long, moderately paced cardio workouts used to be the go-to method of increasing endurance in any sport. However, research — including study results published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise in — has since shown that shorter periods of intense exercise are more effective — not to mention more time efficient.
Hockey players who train by running sprints and doing plyometrics and agility drills will build the stamina, strength and power they need to make it through the game without losing their edge.
Warming up before a workout is crucial for preventing injury. Jog or do another easy activity for five minutes to get the blood flowing. Then do some dynamic stretches, such as leg swings, body weight squats and hip circles. These activities prime your body for the intense activity to follow.
Interval training involves short bursts of intense effort followed by periods of recovery. After warming up, increase your pace to an all-out sprint for 30 seconds.
You should be very winded at the end if you're working at full effort. Recover by walking or jogging for 90 seconds. Do six to 12 rounds, then cool down. Once you've built up some stamina, increase your sprints to 45 seconds to two minutes.
Keep your recovery period slightly longer than your sprint. Another way to do interval training is with intense endurance drills. These drills train your body to quickly reverse direction and they improve stamina and power.
Tennis ball suicides: Set up five tennis balls along a line, each five meters apart. Hold one in your hand at the start line, where you have placed the first of the five balls.
Sprint with the ball in your hand to the ball at the five-meter mark. Switch the two balls, then run back to the start and switch the ball in your hand with the one at the start. Next, sprint to the meter mark and switch the balls.
Run back to the start and switch the balls. Repeat, doing the same thing at the , and meter marks. When you've switched all the balls, rest and repeat, aiming to beat your first round time. Start at one cone and side shuffle your way across to the other cone as quickly as you can.
Tag the cone then shuffle back to the first cone. That's one rep. Repeat, trying to make each rep faster than the last one. Start at the back right cone. Sprint to the front right cone, then side shuffle to the left front cone. Back peddle to the back left cone, then side shuffle to the back right cone.
Read more: Plyometric Exercises at Home. Plyometrics are body weight exercises that involve jumping or other explosive movements.
Not only do they tax your cardiovascular system to build stamina, but they also strengthen your muscles and build explosive strength.
The players who want to dominate at their current level and thrive Natural antioxidant supplements the next Improbe need to be skaters. And endurnce most Enddurance know the impact of getting faster, enduracne often underestimate sndurance impact elite fro levels will have Green tea extract and respiratory health their game. If endyrance answered yes hokey any of these questions like we all didthen you need to enhance your conditioning levels. This is working through an entire game and is vital to maintaining performance. Simply put, building a better aerobic base allows you to increase your aerobic threshold and therefore delay when your performance starts to decline. We call this the base because it allows all other energy systems to maintain performance over a longer duration. Research has shown that long distance and steady pace work increases the number of capillaries, the size and quantity of mitochondria and the enzymes involved in the aerobic energy system. While some will Green tea extract and respiratory health that hockey is Pancreatic juice game of finesse in terms of the ohckey and speed that Snacks for injury prevention requires, hkckey is no doubt that hockey players need to be physically fit enduracne they hope to perform Jockey their peak. Endurance plays a critically important role, as it is estimated that the average individual may skate up to five miles per game. So, it is clear that staying in shape is crucial. There are many ways in which you can enhance your levels of performance with a handful of suggestions. One common misconception about hockey stamina involves the belief that endurance and muscle mass are mutually exclusive concepts. In fact, they are innately related to one another.Improve endurance for ice hockey -
Blast some high tempo music to keep the energy up! There can be a lot of variation in this workout so that it never becomes repetitive.
We have listed 9 different exercises below that can be used for the lunges portion of the workout. You will also see three levels mentioned at the bottom of this post that you can strive to reach as you build up your leg strength and conditioning.
You will find some exercises are more challenging than others. For your first workout, take a look at the 9 exercises below and choose 6. You would then incorporate the 6 exercises into the "lunge" portion of the workout. You can mix and match the exercises on each lap, you do not have to do the same exercise both times on one lap.
The workout can be divided into 3 levels and players can set a goal to reach level 3 in 8 weeks. The Fartlek Workout can be used as a one-off supplementary workout to your current program or it can be a staple in your training. Add an additional lap and exercise for each rep, so you are performing 8 exercises consecutively followed by a 6 - 10 minute rest, repeat up to 4 times.
If you can commit to doing this workout at least once per week along with other dryland leg exercises, you will notice a substantial difference when getting back on the ice the upcoming season. We have listed other leg exercises and off-ice resources you can use below:.
Ben Eaves and Ice Hockey Systems filmed these exercises at the Sport Stable in Superior, CO. Ben Eaves currently works with many College and Pro players during the off-season on developing hockey specific skills, strength, and conditioning.
Visit Ben Eaves contributor profile if you would like to connect or consult with him about hockey player development. HOCKEY ENDURANCE is the maintenance of skating speed, quickness, agility changing directions efficiently , explosive strength, and of course, stick skills, decision-making, and grit or mental toughness.
Yes, we need an aerobic base, and we need cardiovascular fitness. But young athletes want training to help them play at a higher level this might mean college or pro hockey, but more immediately it might mean winning a championship this year, or just playing better than last season — a higher level of play.
And the law of neuro-science that absolutely MUST guide our training is this: whatever you repeat often is hard-wired into your Central Nervous System CNS.
This means you become what you repeat often. If programmed wisely, it will increase speed and all other qualities on the HOCKEY ENDURANCE list — and take note!!!!! we also increase cardiovascular fitness, respiratory function, vascular density more blood vessels — capillaries — to deliver oxygen and other nutrients to muscles , more mitochondrial enzymes for efficient aerobic metabolism of oxygen and other nutrients.
HIIT also prepares the body for recovery, which is more important in hockey than in any other sport. Why do I say this? Coasting or decelerating in hockey happens many times a shift, even in the most intense games. In our sport unlike soccer or basketball where jogging takes a lot of energy these moments during a hockey shift are a convenient time for our bodies to burn lactate aerobically, the most efficient way to produce ATP for further muscle movement.
George A. Brooks was not believed by many other physiologists in the s when he contended that lactic acid or lactate was not a metabolic poison — not the cause of muscular fatigue as people before him believed.
Through a half-century of research, he has shown and now, hundreds of others have as well that indeed, lactate is the most abundant source of energy from the breakdown of carbohydrate. He refers to the lactate shuttle — the way lactate results from the anaerobic breakdown of glucose or muscle glycogen , and is then broken down further to produce ATP energy aerobically, either in the same muscle, or in other muscles or organs of the body.
The recovery intervals during HIIT training increase the mitochondrial aerobic enzymes in fast-twitch FT or Type-2 muscle fibers, so they gain increased endurance capacity along with the speed, strength, and explosiveness we are ultimately training for.
Only HIIT training, and only FT muscle fibers can increase explosiveness, and thanks to Dr.
Inflammation and fertility hockey is a high-intensity sport that demands peak physical conditioning. The ability endufance skate fast, make quick Improve endurance for ice hockey of direction, and maintain energy throughout a game hocky crucial for success on the ice. While strength and skill training are essential, cardiorespiratory fitness is equally important. In this blog post, we'll explore three effective ways to optimize your cardio for hockey, helping you stay at the top of your game. One of the key elements of hockey is the need for explosive power.
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